A flexible work schedule is an alternative to the traditional 9-5, 40-hour week. It allows staff to vary their arrival and/or departure times. According to some guidelines, employees must work a prescribed number of hours per pay period and be present for a daily “base time”. The Fair Labour Standards Act (FSL) does not address flexible work schedules. Alternative working arrangements, such as flexible working hours, are subject to an agreement between the employer and the employee (or employee representative). The U.S. Department of Labor has conducted numerous investigations and published articles and reports on the subject. The flexible schedule is 100% with the employer. There are no fixed deadlines that the flexible schedule must cover or include. And employers are not required by law to offer flexible hours to employees.

This means that employers are responsible for setting their company`s flexible schedules (e.g. schedules). Here are some examples of flexible scheduling: The employee must be willing and able to change their work hours at the request of the supervisor/manager to meet operational needs. There may be times when they have to work or travel outside of scheduled working hours. If an employee violates the rules of your flexible scheduling policy, explain the consequences in this section. Specify whether they receive “warnings” or “strikes” for specific situations. Your Flexible Schedule Requests section should include details on: Flexible schedule, flexible schedule, or flexible schedule is a schedule that allows employees to change the start and end times of their workdays. Flexible scheduling allows an employee to adjust their schedule based on life events (such as a doctor`s appointment). For example, you can alert an employee if they don`t work a day during your business hours. But you can give an employee a strike if you catch them using flexible hours and not working their flexible schedule. Two last tips, one technical, the other related to content: To avoid confusion with the benefit of the public sector, I would recommend private employers who want to take advantage of this advantage to call time something other than “comp time”, such as flexible time or bonus time. In terms of content, this strategy only works if you have properly ranked your exempt employees.

Counting hours and giving additional compensation for those hours could hurt your arguments for exemption in narrow cases, as this is a factor in the fact that employees are actually not exempt. This is not legal advice; For more information, please click here. Part-time employment is another great alternative work arrangement. According to a recent NAP survey, most large law firms offer part-time plans to their experienced lawyers, and the vast majority of part-time employees – about 75% – are women. While part-time employment has traditionally been discouraged by law firms, it is becoming increasingly common as women and other groups demand a better work-life balance. Reconciling work and personal life is a challenge in today`s rapidly changing legal industry. The traditional Monday-Friday work schedule from 8 a.m. to 5 a.m.

is no longer suitable for many employees. Maybe you have young children, are pursuing education, suffering from a chronic illness, or caring for elderly parents. Whatever the reason, today`s workplace offers a range of strategies to achieve a better work-life balance. As you now know from reading this blog, the RSA requires all employers to pay “non-exempt” workers one and a half times of their normal rate of pay for each hour worked by more than 40 employees in a given week. If an employee is exempt from the overtime requirements of the RSA under one of many exceptions, such as “white-collar” exemptions, administrative or occupational exceptions, these so-called “exempt employees” are not required to work overtime for hours they work more than 40 hours per week. However, the RSA also includes provisions on respect for working time for certain employees in the public and private sectors, although the rules work differently for each sector. Article: “Flexible hours: what do we exchange to get them?” Learn more about flexible hours. You may also want to consider including your employees` “base hours” in this section. Base times are times when all flexible employees need to work to improve collaboration. For example, you can ask all flexible employees to work from 11 a.m.

to 1 p.m. in case you need a meeting. If more employees request flexible hours than a unit or department can reasonably manage, the supervisor or department head must respond to requests that comply with these guidelines in a manner that is fair to all employees and in the best interest of the University. Measures that could be taken include remote work, staggered work hours, and rotating flexible periods between employees. The regulation states that public employers may allow their non-exempt workers to accumulate up to 240 hours of comp time, unless the employees work “in a public safety activity, emergency response activity or seasonal activity,” in which case they can commit up to 480 hours. Public employers must also allow employees to use their accumulated hours of remuneration “within a reasonable time after the request” if the use of compensatory time does not unduly disrupt the operation of the public body. Research on work and family issues, including flexible working arrangements. When it comes to implementing a flexible hours policy, there are a few things you need to keep in mind.

You must: You cannot track the hours worked by exempt employees or register them for a specific flexible schedule. This implies that they are not released, which can mean big problems. Make sure your manual doesn`t contain any language that even implies that an employee can be docked in exchange for days off. “You can blow up all your salary and hour exemptions with this one mistake,” Dabbs says. Flexible scheduling helps employees meet the unpredictable demands of family life, illness and personal emergencies. At the same time, these job opportunities reduce employee stress, reduce sick days and increase productivity. Article: “The incidence of flexible working hours is increasing” An article in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Monthly Labor Review indicates that from 1991 to 1997, the percentage of full-time employees with flexible hours at their main workplace increased from 15.1% to 27.6%. Flexible hours can lead to problems with the RSA Once you`ve established a policy, you need to make sure you don`t run into the sworn enemy of flexible hours, which FLSA.By a wide margin that this legislation causes the most problems for HR staff – for both exempt and non-exempt employees.

This raises an important point: make sure you know beyond any doubt whether the worker planning a flexible arrangement is really exempt or not. Even some mega-companies allow staggered schedules. A recent Legal Times article described a Washington DC lawyer who arrived at the office at 6 a.m. every day and left at 2:55 p.m. to pick up her children from school. If you`re looking for flexible arrangements, but don`t want to reduce your work schedule or pay, a multi-tiered schedule might be right for you. If you want employees to fill out a form for their flexible schedule request, specify where they can access the form. However, as more and more companies embark on new ways of working, these problems are solved. And ultimately, most problems are usually avoidable – as long as HR remains pretty rigid when it comes to understanding flexible scheduling arrangements. Section 207(o) of the FLSA allows public employers at the federal, state, or local level to compensate non-exempt workers for more than 40 hours of work with compensation time instead of cash overtime.

Since the working time of non-exempt public workers replaces overtime, public employers must credit this working time at the same rate as overtime in cash: no less than one and a half hours of working time for each hour of overtime. A public employer who pays for his non-exempt overtime by compensatory hourly time contravenes the regulations of the RSA. One work arrangement that finds its way into the workplace is flexible scheduling. To reduce absenteeism and better meet the scheduling needs of your employees, you need to create a flexible scheduling policy for your company. Flexible working hours do not reduce the total number of hours worked in a given week. Base hours are usually required when all employees need to be on site. The base period may vary depending on the requirements of the position and the operational requirements of the unit or department. First of all: get started Of course, there is no law requiring you to offer your employees flexible working conditions. But there are laws that determine the wording and structure of your policy. The most important thing to remember when taking your first step is that you need to have a policy.

“These agreements should be considered work orders,” says Camille Olson, a partner in labor and employment law at Seyfarth Shaw`s Chicago office. “There should be legitimate and objective standards, set out in a written policy, as to which positions are open to these agreements and which are not. It shouldn`t be informal because it could be seen as a reward. Depending on your type of business, not all employees fit well with your flexible hours policy.